Of Blackbirds and Canaries
by idylweiss
Summary: In which he wants to see her as Patria, and she wants to be seen as human. Not quite a love story, but close enough for the two of them. Snapshots set around a general (and often screwy) timeline in the months leading up the the June Rebellion. Not even vaguely canon-based (okay, maybe vaguely), content warning for abuse.
1. un

He always had an affinity for broken things. As a child, he'd wanted to be a doctor, a physician, tending to people's ills, or a mechanic, a fixer-upper of people's possessions. Enjolras supposed that was what he was trying to do now, to fix a broken society, to cure it of its wounds. (By murdering it from the ground level up. Right. Good.)

And from his place as a planet orbiting another sun, he thought this particular satellite was as broken as broken could be.

Enjolras had met the girl through Marius — Marius-the-dreamer, Marius-the-lovestruck, Marius-the-one-who-played-at-revolution — and had been immediately struck by how jittery she was. Eyes flitting left and right between two doorways and calloused fingers that twisted around each other like snakes waiting to strike.

She had hair, raggedy hair, that sat matted to her face, and eyes rich as the bedrock of sweeping rivers, dulled by years of malnutrition. she was skinny in a way that was hard to look at for long, with arms and legs and an emaciated neck that looked brittle and breakable, as if the merest graze would shatter her.

She was a street rat, but had the defiance of a queen.

_Yes_, he had decided. _This_ was what his revolution looked like.

* * *

**note**

um, yay? decided to post this from tumblr with actual capitalisation this time.  
feel free to get on my case about bad writing and characterisation. :)

- nora


	2. deux

That he tried too hard was her initial impression of him, and Éponine would stand by it. Tried to hard to talk of such big ideas (the big ideas that didn't include the little people), tried so hard to speak with passion and candor about a life that was as far from his reach as the sun was to Icarus (her mother had always tried to retain some pretense of high society, her father laughed and dove lower into the sewers, and Éponine herself was only interested so long as there was a story to be told).

Though of course no one ever reached for Éponine's life. they fell to it, as she had herself done.

She'd grown up surrounded by trinkets and toys she didn't even think twice about. She had had dolls with wool hair and wooden limbs, stuffed full of expectations. She had had books with fairies and beautiful pictures in them, books that told her she was a princess alone atop some high stone tower and that a prince was sure to be waiting to marry her when she turned sixteen.

She was seventeen now, and she had lost everything.

The first things to go had been her dresses, which she didn't mind much because they were ugly and out of season and could be replaced. Then went her dolls, but it was no skin off her back because they were balding and the paint that made their faces so pretty was peeling and careworn. And she didn't care the day they carted her big bed away, even though carved on the poles were notches indicating how much she'd grown and she would have liked to've kept that to measure herself by. (Papa was tall, Maman was short, and she wanted to be tall like Papa. Heroines of her fairytales were always tall and slender. Short girls did not make for good princesses.)

(Éponine was short now, shorter than all the boys at the café, all her sisters-in-arms standing at the streetcorners, every heroine to grace the stage.)

The books were the last to go, but only because Maman hid them from Papa. Papa had never seen the use of papers and writing and, to be truthful, neither had Maman, but the cheap thrills of popular romance spared Éponine's books until the day Papa was looking for his cravat and found them in the cranny Maman had shoved them in.

"We'll get them back," he promised, wrenching the last of the books away from Éponine's small fingers. "Once the inn's back on its feet again, we'll buy you all t'books in the world."

By that time they'd been too long without bread for her to believe him, but she handed over the books anyway. Her stomach hurt more than her heart, and her head was dizzy and her lips were parched, and Gavroche was wailing in the corner. It seemed easier to accept her father's placations than to protest them.

She wondered if this fine young academic, with his flaxen head full of hair and his upturned mouth full of teeth and his limber arms full of books would have had her do. _Hold on to your books. Education is the key to elevating society_. That's what one of his friends had remarked to Marius just the other day.

Education was well and fine, Éponine thought, and it filled your mind with all sorts of useful things, like how to quote old poems at young girls who didn't understand their meaning, but it didn't help fill your stomach when hunger clawed like a winter ache up your insides. The things Éponine had picked up from other girls on the streets were far more practical — how to lie, how to cheat, how to steal, how to bewitch desperate men to pay for your services even with mud in your hair and dirt on your face.

She wanted to know if this grand young man with heart full of thunder and a mouth all crammed with the words of other men knew of the pains of the cold that wailed at you, that stripped you to your bones, if he knew of the sores that started to fester on your tongue, the hair that would fall out in clumps, the shadows that started to haunt the edges of your vision, and the people you thought you'd lost long ago appearing like ghosts before your eyes.

Listening to him talk, though, all this faded into background noise that would sometimes bubble and buzz irritatingly, but never quite to the point of disturbing her from the hypnotic way his mouth formed his words. Éponine had long ceased to believe in angels, but the young man with the big dreams and the name that was utterly unpronounceable was beautiful in his vengeance, and when he talked of revolution she could almost believe in it.

Almost.

Éponine (Thenardier) Jondrette had no more illusions about life, but she never minded a good story when it came along. He tried too hard, but she was willing to listen.

* * *

_note_  
probably a good time for a disclaimer since i always forget about them.  
i don't own les misérables - the book, the musical, or the various film adaptations.


	3. trois

In truth, Éponine did not go to the meetings of Les Amis because she had any mind for revolution. Nor did she go specifically for Marius, even if watching him talk animatedly with his friends was not precisely what one would call unpleasant (he was much too occupied with his big ideas there to spend time with her).

She went because her mother couldn't paint her body black and blue there, went because her father couldn't spit filthy words at her there, couldn't ask her why she was so worthless there, couldn't strip her down to her chemise and push her out on the streets and lock the door until she came back with money there. It was warm in the little café, she couldn't feel the imprints of ravenous men's fingers on her bodies in the little cafe, and there was always a soul or two in the little cafe who was too drunk to tell her apart from their friends and who would purchase her food and a cup of ale.

(Éponine didn't have a soul, but she wouldn't begrudge the coin of those who did.)

They could sit here all night, talking loudly of revolution and _Vive la France_! and scare away all the other patrons with their toasts to a Republic that, as far as Éponine could tell, never actually existed except in the imaginations of university students with no other occupation to wile away long hours.

But she was more interested in raising her own silent toast to warm meals and a lice-free bed to sleep in.

* * *

_note_  
this will grow a plot  
someday


	4. quatre

He would sometimes stop to look at the girl from across the café and contemplate his next essay, which was to be printed on a pamphlet and distributed for free around the streets of Paris. The theme was to be that old line of Horace's: _dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori_. (Though he suspected Grantaire would be quick to turn it into '_dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, sed dulcius pro patria vivere, et dulcissimum pro patria bibere._')

Men had to be prepared to die for their revolution, and they must not flinch while doing it. That was valour, that was honour as he knew it.

Better it was in the days of old when men fought battles over physical land, when they defended it against its invaders. People were more willing to die fighting for something tangible, something concrete, more willing to take up arms when there was an immediate reward (he wondered idly if he had the means to offer some monetary compensation).

People didn't tend to get riled up over the _spirit_ of a nation unless there was a horde of Englishmen charging at it, he figured, or unless every last one of them was starving, and even then they couldn't be trusted not the pave the streets red with the blood of the damned.

Enjolras was a good writer; he knew he was. He had a silver tongue that could charm money out of misers and a way with words that could bend iron to his will, but no man was so easily led to certain death. No, he needed something tangible, something real that people could be urged to fight for.

Friends joked that his first love was his country (_Enjolras, Enjolras, amat patriam apprime_ became something of a chant around the schoolyard), but if that were so then his mistress would be knowledge.

And he knew that revolution's best friend was, well, firstly money, and secondly a rallying point. He hadn't learned _nothing_ in school.

And she was perfect for it.

Inking his pen for the fifth time in three minutes, Enjolras had the odd little thought that Éponine was very much like France herself - charming girls wrapped in old rags they treasured like new riches. There was no beauty to be found in either the Jondrette girl or his _patria'_s face, but the shadow of an old grace still lingered, and a few more virtues would dress them up charmingly.

And if her life could be made to parallel France's, if she could be brought to the light, if she could be tidied up and saved, how beautiful and symbolic that would be!

* * *

_*dulce et decorum est (etc) - it is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland_

_*dulce et decorum est (etc) the second time round - it is sweet and fitting to die for the father land, but sweeter to live for the fatherland, and sweetest to drink for it._  
_*enjolras, enjolras (etc) - enjolras, enjolras, he loves the fatherland above all_

_three years of latin and i can't be sure if all the latin's correct in the last one. boo. (all i remember is lesbia nautae (nautam?) amat.) and this used to be longer, and he was a meanie about it, because it's not a nice thing to make someone into an ideal and put them onto a pedestal, but then i couldn't figure out how to end it and ended up cutting a lot of stuff instead. :c_

_also i know a lot of the les mis fandom likes enjolras as the golden-hearted revolutionary, and ngl i have a soft spot for revolutionaries but i don't think it's implausible that he could be so dedicated for the revolution that he loses sight of what his 'cause' is truly about, and that is the humanising of the poor, the notion that they should be treated with respect, and that it is in fact society's responsibility to make sure they have the means to survive, nor do i think it's particularly implausible for him to do douchetastic things (like assigning arbitrary traits to other people regardless of their hopes/dreams/etc, and to turn them into symbols without their consent, and to push onto them the responsibility of representing a large population of people._


	5. cinq

Papa once told her that war was the best time to make a profit. Spirits were high, people had death wishes, and everyone was looking to get drunk. Éponine was beginning to believe that that was true.

These days, the Café Musain was packed from mid-afternoon until the infant hours of morning. 'Ponine sat in her little corner today, a short reprieve from wandering the street corners looking to be paid for her company.

The mug she nursed didn't quite drive out the chill, but it numbed her aches enough to stop the throbbing, and Éponine supposed that was the best she could ask for.

Someone dropped into the seat next to her. It was that yellow-haired man, the one with the impossible name, who made all those serious speeches.

"You," he said, with a breath heavy with wine and eyes overflowing with dreams, "are _patria_."

Éponine glanced up from her warm fingers to regard him coldly. "I'm what?"

"_You_ are _patria_," he repeated, this time with an accusatory finger shoved near her face.

She blinked. and then pushed his hand away, edging further from him. "Sorry, m'sieur, but some of us have a hard time understanding your fancy ways of insulting people."

He shook his head no no _nonononono_. he slurred, "You are patria. _patria, patriae_, first declension noun. Latin. You're our country. You are representative of the disenfranchised, those the government has abandoned, those who have been trampled by the bourgeoisie. You are everyone who does hard labour for little pay while those born with money own every means of production in this nation, occupy every seat of power, are able to perpetrate and perpetuate institutionalised ills against those without the means to retaliate. You're who we fight for."

Woe to the urchin who tried to understand that; Éponine didn't even try. she wiggled a tooth that was loose in the back of her mouth and told him placidly, "I don't recall asking you to fight for me."

"But you need me to!" he insisted. "Things much change! Someone must champion the cause."

"I'm not a cause, m'sieur." He was getting very hard to ignore, both hands reaching out to grab one of hers. "And you are drunk."

"I'm not drunk, I'm making you see!" he said with a hysterical laugh. "A Paris, free from the shackles of poverty, free from the monarchy that gorges itself on the suffering of those it claims to lead. a Paris, where all men are on equal footing, where all men are citizens! Don't you understand your own oppression?"

"Not when there are drunk men yelling about it in my ear, m'sieur." But he would not go away, would not leave her be, would not stop _breathing_ on her and _touching_ her and she felt phantoms of other hands ghosting over her skin, and so she wrenched her hands angrily away and ran out of the café.

(They'd never understand.)

Enjolras would remember very little of the incident the morning after (with a splitting headache and an ache in his right eye; it had been a while since he'd gotten drunk), and sought to remember why he felt such an overwhelming sense of shame. Éponine didn't forget a detail, but did her best not to remember.

(She was good at that.)


	6. six

There was a sum of twenty sous singing merrily from her pocket and a smile upon her face. Twenty sous she'd stolen from passing strangers, yes, but it was enough to buy a few meals if she budgeted it well, and there would be perhaps some left over to buy M'sieur Marius some candles or a pen if she cut back on her share. (Food could be filched, but favour needed currying.) She skipped down Rue Dauphine, very conscious of the coins pressed flat against the palm of her hand.

It wasn't often she had this much money, and certainly not often she had enough of it to spend on something other than food, and she wanted to make sure she spent it well.

M'sieur Marius had once told her he had a wealthy grandfather, but that he broke with him because of a 'difference in ideology,' and it had left him without money. Éponine couldn't fathom it. to have money, and to willingly give it up — she didn't believe she could ever. No, coin was far too precious a commodity to waste on squabbles.

If Éponine had a wealthy grandfather, she wouldn't give him up for the world. She'd have dresses the kind she often saw pretty ladies wearing, all pink and purple with the large sleeves that rustled pleasantly like the autumn wind as it brushed past the oak trees. She'd have food that was hot, and rich, and filling. And she could wake up warm, surrounded by silk pillows (she didn't really know what silk felt like, except that rich ladies wore it) instead of cold, hounded by the predawn chill.

And anyway, grandfathers were _family_. Papa always told her that family looked out for each other; family stuck together. Family never split apart. (Of course, this was after 'Vroche had left, and she was the only child Papa could enlist to go on his trips with the Patron-Minette, but if it meant that Éponine was treasured, that she could be adored, that she had some utility to someone, somewhere, she would never question this line of reasoning.)

Bells jingled when she pushed open the door to the bookstore she knew Marius and his friends often frequented, and she stepped inside, a little wary. Éponine lingered in the doorway, half-expecting someone to come to hurry her out of the respectable establishment, but no one came. So she slipped between two bookshelves and tried to disappear.

Éponine was only here for a pen, but being in the company of so many books made her feel so very small, so stupid. ("I could have read these," Éponine whispered to herself, but her world was populated by shadows and regrets where in every corner lurked the gaunt corpses of _could have_s and _would have_s and _should have_s, which were worn thin with much perusal. She was proud of her half-literacy - it made her special in the midst of her peers, and it had impressed Monsieur Marius the first time they'd met — but it had rusted away, corroded to nothing but an ability to read a smattering of words from children's stories, and no need to write much. And when she stood in the company of learnéd people like Marius, she felt so clumsy and ungraceful, even as he stood and smiled and helped coax the words from her throat and never once made fun of her.)

"You're Marius' friend," someone behind her remarked.

She turned to see first in front of her a heavy, leather-bound book, and then farther upwards the smiling face of Monsieur Enjolras. (Did he remember? But no, he would not. Men never remembered the way their hands grabbed.) Éponine bit back her words and shrunk into the shelf.

"I would never dare to presume," she deferred. (_Oh_ but how she dared, how far she dared to dream beyond mere friendship!)

M'sieur Enjolras laughed — a soft, almost voiceless gasp of air. "You give yourself far too little credit, mademoiselle," he said gently. "If Marius did not consider you a friend of his, he would never have brought you to our meetings, and I should certainly have not allowed you to stay."

"You've seen me at your meetings?" she wanted to say. "I am not invisible, then?" but she was fighting back a smile of delight at the way he called her _mademoiselle_. It had been a long time since someone had addressed her like that, and it gave her a secret, burning thrill. Even M'sieur Marius had stopped using it, calling her 'Ponine' instead, which was as distancing in its fraternity as it was heartening in its familiarity, and made her feel as if she were all of ten again.

But it was much in the nature of Éponine to shy away from those things that brought her joy, lest they be taken away from her, or used to hurt her, so she looked instead at the book he held between his slender fingers. "Can you understand all that, sir?" she questioned, letting some of her awe bleed into her voice.

He looked down at his book.

"Not all of it," he admitted. "Some of it's quite dense, you see, and i have trouble understanding. but I fancy I can get through most of it without _too_ debilitating a headache."

"Can you?" he asked, after a pause. "read, that is?"

"Yes," she said, with a proud toss of her head. "My papa taught me when I was just five, you know. and I learned to count when I was three."

"How impressive."

Éponine shrugged. "Make fun of you all you want, m'sieur, but it means a great deal to me."

"I assure you, mademoiselle, Is wasn't being facetious — I wasn't making fun of you. I never learned my numbers until I was five at least, and I refused to read until my father gave me a sound lashing and told me that I would be the shame of his household."

"Oh." Placated, Éponine turned and smoothed down the front of her coat. She felt the awkward silence pressing on her from all side with the sort of claustrophobia she felt only when she was down in the sewers with her papa until, just as the young man was about to turn away, she cried — "I want you to teach me to read."

"Not—" she was quick to add, "That I can't read, just that it's been a little while since I've last read, and i'm scared that perhaps I don't know as much as I used to, and surely it'd be easier to remember if someone were to help me and —"

"Could you not ask Marius?"

She shook her head with a ferocity that almost took it off. "I couldn't. Not for the world."

(Cognes, c-o-g-n-e-s; look, _I'm not like the rest of them, monsieur._ (Please, you there with the lovely eyes and the expensive pocketwatch, be my prince and rescue me.))

"So you do not hold me in as high esteem as you do Pontmercy, then?" he asked lightly, a half smile warming the cold features of his face.

Her answer was direct. "No, I do not."

(The smile widens into something rather beautiful.) "Regardless, mademoiselle, a lady of the revolution ought to be able read those words that give her power."

Well-satisfied, Éponine grinned, an impish little quirk of the lips that gave to her, if only for a brief moment, the blush of youth again.

Perhaps she would get M'sieur Marius his pen another time.


	7. sept

**trigger warning for suicide ideations**

Sometimes she dreamed of drowning again, but only very late at night, when the lights dim to as low as they would go in a city full of stars. She'd imagine the round fingers of the Seine caressing her body more softly than any human touch ever had. She wanted to hear the loud silence of the rush of the water about her, to be able to hear the _thumpthumpthump_ of her heartbeat thrumming through a body too small for echoes.

It would be blessed silence that filled her mind, and not the din of the city above, or the disquiet of her own making. And the water, the water, will wash all her sins away, and she will be clean, clean, clean again.

No ghosts would haunt the corners of her vision, no whispers to daze and confuse, no voices in the back of her mind muttering an incessant stream of curses. No horrible, desperate, wretched love that would never, could never, not ever in any world come to pass.

And she could just be Éponine, Éponine as she was, as she had been, as she'd lost.

The urge had buried itself under a layer of thinly-stretched happiness since she first met Monsieur Marius, when he looked at her (_at_ her! as if she were corporeal, composed of flesh and bone and transient emotion and not _through_ her, as if she were the spectre she sometimes imagined herself to be) with his gentle eyes and reached into his pocket for what coin he could give her, but it was creeping back in.

It wasn't that she wanted to die, really, so much as she wanted to stop living, because she had realised long ago that in her life there could be no happy ending, that the best she could get was a tiny space in Monsieur Marius' soul from where she might bear witness to a happiness she could have known in another life.

And she had at some point believed herself to be content in knowing this, satisfied with what attention M'sieur Marius had to give her, but that certainty that looked so fine under the sun turned waifish and elusive under the moon, because things looked better in the day, and Éponine was a creature made of the shadows of the night.


	8. huit

Day crept up like an ember bursting suddenly into flame, startling Enjolras from a restless night of sleep. He'd dreamt of a Paris drowned in blood. Whether it was his blood or the blood of the _ancien regime_ he couldn't tell, only that it scared him. He took a breath, and ran a hand through his mop of hair, which was slightly damp and sticky from his sweat.

Swinging his legs over the side of the beg, Enjolras grabbed a shirt from where it hung on the headboard (it might not have been fresh; he couldn't be bothered to care) and a slightly crumpled cravat from the bedside table and started dressing himself.

Morning had not fully settled atop the steeples of Paris, though there were still a few lights glowing in the bright orange of early dawn, and a few birds chirped still from their perch in the trees. There was a jittery energy that skittered across his skin and left him on edge.

_Breathe_, he told himself. It was nothing more than a bad dream. (Even if it felt too close to prophecy.) _And you are a man in service of justice, and reason, and rationality_.

Still, though, he made sure to feel for the lucky stone his sister had given to him before he departed from Chateau-Thierry before he headed out for the day. If he got to school early enough, the library might yet have filled up with people yet, and he could hope to have a few hours to himself to catch up on coursework (though really who could fault him for not caring about playwriting in the seventeenth century? Moliere was well and good, but for all his poking fun of the aristocracy, he never really did anything to cut them down to size, and actively profited off their greed) and write a few more articles for _Le Nationale._

He was not afraid of dying (all men died, after all, and if he were to lay down his life for his country, then he would merely go earlier and prouder than most), and it wasn't the vastness of the inscrutable unknown that tore holes in his courage. He was afraid of futility, and uselessness, and above all the idea that he might lead his friends their their deaths for a mere nothing-at-all. He knew they placed absolute trust in him, believed so resolutely in his words, and were not afraid to follow him even into the realms of god, and that, somehow, made it worse.

* * *

_notes_: i'm not the fondest of this. :(


	9. neuf

She had entire universes in her eyes, but only if one cared enough to see them.

There were not many people who could, though, and notice that there was amusement and wit buried somewhere in the deep wet wells of her eyes, or that her mouth would often quiver when she found something amusing, or that her smile was made from the rich velvet of swirling galaxies. But people always saw what they wanted to see in Éponine, and she could accept that. Better they saw a false reflection of her than no reflection at all.

When she was younger, she was her parents' pet, a little toy in which they could pour their money and have affection come out of. Now that she was older, she was their most lucrative asset, and they took care not to bruise her too much. For some time in her youth she had felt guilty, believed that the change was her fault, that she was responsible for the loss of their inn. Else why would Papa shower cruel words and angry fists where once he showered her with love, and affection, and kind kisses?

And for a while in her premature adulthood she had envied her brother, who had all the freedom and all the luck, but she'd long since learned the streets were no place for a girl to wander alone, and her Papa did not much like the idea of losing his steady source of income. (It was a shadow and a threat that hung over her like some grim executioner's blade.)

For the men she entertained she was just a bodily substitution for the embrace of others, more vibrant and interesting. For Montparnasse she was a little songbird, who sung on his command.

Over the years she'd learned to exploit this to her best advantage — a weak little cough, a meek _please, m'sieur_ when she wanted a few extra coins, a toss of the hair and a jutting of the chin if she wanted to be paid for the night — and, for herself, it meant that she could easily imagine herself to be any number of people, foremost among them the altar at which Marius worshipped.

Because when M'sieur Marius came, he was pure and he was good and golden, and for a while at least, she could be just Éponine around him, and she felt so sure that his green eyes bored straight into her and saw within her the void in the space her soul used to occupy. (Now she was 'Ponine, the little sister, which did not please her but did not displease her either. Any affection, no matter how platonic, was better than no affection at all.)

She was the pilgrim and he was the god: fixed, ever-constant, never-changing, and so far above her it felt naughty, clandestine, sacrilegious even, to picture Monsieur Marius as anything other than he was. But the high of temporary bliss smoothed over any misgivings, and the appeal of imagining herself a much-loved princess outweighed the light touch of second thoughts. (He would never know; she wasn't hurting anyone.)

Upon the occasion of their first meeting he'd looked so much like the heroes she used to dream about she almost mistook him for one, and sent a prayer up to God for the confirmation of his existence and his mercy on little street rats who wanted to be taken in and coddled again. She had wanted so badly to impress him that day (impress him now) with what meagre things she still remembered from her youth — a scattered few precious words here and there and that one _cognes_ she knew how to write. It had been a petty, and a desperate plea for attention, and it had worked, and she had been pleased, but now she wanted more.

In that book store, surrounded by all those large volumes she could not begin to decipher, she felt herself very small indeed, and very pitiable, which was not a state of being she particularly enjoyed. How pathetic he must have thought of her, so proud for knowing to write in her toddler-hand a single word, which condemned her at once as a criminal.

And she wanted to be more than that. She wanted to be someone Monsieur Marius could venerate and respect, and speak of as he spoke of other girls, with a sort of gentleness of tone and delicacy in reference that she would never be on the receiving end of ("'Tis merely 'Ponine, don't worry for her; she knows more about sin than the rest of us put together').

Éponine wanted to read, because even if M'sieur Marius refused to see, she was determined that the rest of the world should open their eyes.


	10. dix

A/N: So the reason it's taken so long to post this (despite it having been sitting, written, for like three months, on Tumblr) is because I'm much too lazy to go through it and capitalize what needs to be capitalized, so I've decided to just not capitalize and hope it's not too much of a distraction. xo, nora

* * *

he had planned for paris a spectacle the likes of which they had never before seen. _this_ was not quite it, but for their first demonstration it was far from disappointing. enjolras had called in favours from several printers from across the city and had copies of the _déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen_passed out to members of the crowd.

the night before, he'd stayed up to compose and memorise a speech of admirable vigour, titled_ sic semper tyrannis_ (he always fell back on his latin when he wanted to make some grand point), detailing the lack of sustainability of a state of monarchy, the duty of government towards its weakest and most vulnerable, and about the independence movements of america, italy, poland, and several of the french colonies.

it had all the characteristics of a terrifically rousing speech, but he had forgotten very nearly all of it when he stood to speak.

still, though, while the speech he ended up giving was nowhere near as impressive, he was suitably satisfied and, by the time the police had come to break up the crowds and act like they were in the business of protecting rather than persecuting the people, his words were out in the open and 'thus ever to tyrants' hung on the lips of all, even those who did not perhaps quite understand the reference. (it was probably better they didn't.)

but if the success of government depended on the consent of the governed, so, too, did the success of the revolution depend on the support of those on whose behalf it was occurring. and if this demonstration was any indication, the people were fully on their side.

rare were the days he was perfectly satisfied (it was hard to be, when injustice and poverty were in every place one looked, when it enveloped one in its arms as if it were one's stifling, smothering mother, except that the monarchy was most definitely not enjolras' mother), but enjolras was fairly close now, fliers tucked under his right arm and tricolour draped over his left.

"you look pleased, m'sieur."

he glanced to the right to see eponine leaning against the wall of his building.

"how did you—?"

eponine dimpled in one cheek. "best not to ask, m'sieur. you mightn't like the answer very much."

"right." he fumbled with his keys, feeling extraordinarily uncomfortable and rather like one of the samples his professors required him to look at under a microscope while she regarded him unwaveringly with her dark eyes. she was a strange girl, marius' friend, and didn't seem to care much for convention. any other person would have looked away by now.

"i saw you talking today, monsieur," she said. "you like to use some awfully nice words."

enjolras smiled. "merci, mademoiselle. but i'm afraid words are only nice if people take them to heart. great speeches don't do much unless they move people to great actions."

"then perhaps you might consider using simpler ones. we're not all university students, monsieur enjolras."

"perhaps." enjolras pocketed his key and shifted his banner to the other arm so he could open the door. "is there something you wanted, mademoiselle jondrette?"

the girl worried her lips between her teeth and pushed herself off the wall and wrapped and unwrapped her arms around her frighteningly frail waist and took her merry time to consider before answering. (enjolras, like many men, did not have an unlimited store of patience, and was trying his best to stretch it to cover her reluctance. but he was far from an angel on the best of days, and the fervour of success burned in his belly and sizzled in his blood, pushing him to move, move, move because the fires of revolution needed to be stoked before they could burst into flame.)

"you said you'd teach me to read, m'sieur. or rather, to help me remember to read."

ah, yes. he had said that, hadn't he? combeferre believed that the education of the lower classes was key to their elevation and, as such, the elevation of all of society. and enjolras trusted combeferre's judgement, and took the other man's words often to heart. there was reason to it, and as a student himself, he did not doubt the importance of an education, the kind which sowed the seeds of revolution in his own mind, and would not, if he could help it, keep it from anyone.

but enjolras was a young man, and very eager and earnest in his youth, and while no one could mistake him for a romantic, even he was not immune to the charm of ascribing romance to certain situations.

say, for example, the symbolism of a young revolutionary leading the girl who so personified the country he fought for from the darkness of illiteracy to the light of education. (he was twenty-two. there were many things he knew, and even more he didn't. it was forgivable that he sometimes indulged himself in fancy, he reasoned, if the rest of the time he focused himself on the things that ought to be done.)

and he had felt rather bad for her, looking so little and so cowed but also so, so unwilling to let herself be intimidated, and he had smiled at her because she was so prideful and in that she had reminded him a little of himself.

"and i haven't forgotten, but, as you see, i've been busy."

"you aren't busy now, are you?" she crossed her arms. had she always been so pigheaded? he hadn't noticed that she was particularly intractable when she was around marius, but then, he hadn't made it his business to care about much beyond the realm of his interest, which at the moment consisted of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

"are you always so persistent?" he asked, but without any real bite to his voice, running a free hand through his mess of curls. he could not imagine why she wished so badly to know how to read, but he was not a man to go back on his word when it was given.

"do you always break promises, m'sieur?" she asked, just as lightly.

he quirked his lips, a touch perhaps of a smirk on the corners of his mouth. "i suppose i ought to invite you in." he doubted she needed an invitation, but he felt it best to extend one regardless.

she did not deign to answer, and instead pushed herself away from the side of the building, looping around to ascend the stairs and follow him inside.

he lived in a small garret, sparsely furnished with windows that caught the morning sun and a good, sturdy desk made of good, sturdy wood and a similarly serviceable bed, and a few dried flowers sitting in vases that were only ornamental in function and not aesthetics from the last time jehan decided to chipper up the place. it was a place that his mother would have been mortified to see, devoid of any resemblance to the fashionable parlour back home.

still, it was good enough for him, if a little messy (combeferre was coolheaded, methodical; enjolras had books scattered about everywhere, but he knew where every last one was) and perhaps not as spacious as he was used to. not that he couldn't afford better quarters, he'd tell himself those days when he woke up a little claustrophobic. but father sent him reluctant money for food and clothes and books and rent, and he spent the rest of it building up a rather alarming little stockpile of weapons.

"welcome in," he said, opening the door. he watched her pick her way gingerly across the parlor, which was littered with the shells of half-completed thoughts and muddled sentences, to sit on a patch of empty floor not two inches away from a chair. she looked up expectantly at him as he closed the door and laid both his satchel and the tricolour gingerly down on the little stand.

(a few notes he tucked into the back of his mind for later, when he'd fulfilled his duties to this girl:

combeferre's theory on education and the gradual elevation of society through the informing of the masses needed to be elaborated upon and perhaps printed in a pamphlet to be passed around at their next demonstration.

were all girls so tenacious? or just this particular one?)

"you can sit on the stool, you know," he mentioned as he, too, stepped around the mess of paper on the floor.

"oh, i couldn't do that, m'sieur! chairs are very uncomfortable, you know, once you've gotten used to the hard of the pavement."

eponine was smiling, but he didn't know how he was to respond to that. "i don't have many books i expect you'd be interested in, but those i do have are yours for the picking."

there were books aplenty, though; books enough to feed the fires of half of paris for a month„ and they sat on all surfaces and were stacked in piles to form haphazard furniture, but they could be easily divided into two categories — school and political theory.

he was right in his conjecture. she shuffled through his books, picking this one up or setting that one down, and the rustling of the pages drove him nearly to distraction. enjolras forced himself to sit still, though, and suffer it, because it was likely she was not going to go away and leave him be until he'd fulfilled the terms of his hasty, well-intentioned but perhaps not well-thought-out promise. (there should have been qualifiers. modifiers. other responses. "i'd be happy to teach you as soon as the revolution is over." "i'd be happy to find someone to teach you." it wasn't as if he wasn't a busy enough man already.)

"you have no picture books," she accused, as if illustrated children's tales were a requirement for all, including young law students long out of childhood, to own.

a sly rebuke almost slipped out before he convinced himself that the less he said, the better for the both of them. instead, he watched as she carefully selected a slim volume which was gorgeously bound in red and inlaid with gold script — a selection of the essays of michel de montaigne.

"this one looks very beautiful," she decided, holding it up for his inspection.

he smiled.


	11. onze

she was a quick study, and an eager one at that. enjolras imagined that with any competent teacher she would fly through even the most abstract of books with ease. (he knew his own limitations.)

they stumbled through a little of the montaigne on the first day. she was perched precariously on a pile of papers while he leaned against the desk by the window so he could read over her shoulder and correct any mistakes and explain anything she didn't understand. and she left just as the sky began to dim, with a little flutter of her fingers and a flick of her wrist, saying that she needed to be open for business by dark, a euphemism he didn't quite understand until later, when he slapped an ink-stained hand to his forehead and said, "oh," very loudly to the air.

he might have expected that the girl would be working as one who "sold her wares," but, to be honest, he'd never really thought much about her beyond her connection to his conception of patria before today. (he wondered if "france whoring herself out to absolutism and monarchy" was a sustainable metaphor.) but she was interesting, and she spoke often and without reservation, and he could see why marius had been so eager to bring her to meet les amis.

because the jondrette girl — eponine — was clever, though not in that grandiose, circuitous way he knew so well. she was blunt, rather like a hammer to the head, and a little grating, but she did not have to dress her ideas up with dense academic language to give them the likeness of truth or the conviction of authority.

no, it was experience that loaned her words gravity and gave them weight; experience that did not need fancy words to elucidate. there was a sweetness and a sorrow to that, that reminded him of a wilting flower, soured by the wind and rain, and he found himself feeling sorry for her, even if she didn't feel sorry for herself.

(revolution was what she needed, though, he thought, and not condolences.)

—-

when she decided that thursday afternoons were when they were to meet regularly for their lessons, he had no idea, but she was sitting on the steps in front of his building the next week reading slowly from the red montaigne when he came home from the university.

"what are you doing?"

"waiting for you." (like it was the most evident thing in the world! and it was, but she knew that's not what he meant.)

"you're not one for convention, are you?" he questioned, when she did not even lift her head to acknowledge him.

"monsieur," she explained patiently, and very, very slowly, as if he were but a child of two, "if i followed every convention your fine parisian society had to offer, i would have long been a pile of bones buried in an unmarked grave some distance from the city proper. if i were buried at all, that is."

enjolras was a little taken aback by the bluntness of the way she talked about her life. he himself always tiptoed around the viler parts of poverty, not because they ought to be hidden or because his friends had weak stomachs, but because he'd always felt so out of his depth talking about something with which he only had a passing acquaintance.

but she was beaming, and her fingernails were a-tapping on the hard cover of the red book, and she was bouncing on the balls of her feet, so he said nothing. (he was wont to say nothing, and he often wanted to clarify that it wasn't because he was wilfully ignoring people, only that for one so eloquent he was also so very often out of words and did not know what to say. but eponine never looked like she needed much of an explanation; she accepted his silence and filled it in herself, and it was good. it was comfortable.)

he followed her upstairs. (idle thoughts: she looked like a selkie, drifting in on the foam of the sea, casting away the animal skin that so confined her in the water.)

patiently she waited atop the stairs for him. he took the stairs two at a time until he reached her.

"shall we?" he asked. she tilted her head to the side. he reminded himself he was doing this for the revolution. he pushed open the door and she walked in.

* * *

_**note**_: not sure if i made it clear or not so here's me saying explicitly that it is not okay that enjolras is viewing eponine as nothing more than a symbol for his revolution. he is stripping her of her agency (since he never asked for her consent) and of her humanity. because she is one person with her experiences and she should not be abstracted, especially when she belongs to an intersection of abstractions that inherently dehumanise and oppress and disenfranchise, and her experiences should not be projected onto a group of people who all have their individual experiences.

he'll get better though. i hope. :)


End file.
